Minetest C55 Review

December 21, 2012

If you:

Can’t afford Minecraft

Don’t want to pay for it

Can’t run Minecraft

Feel like trying a similar game

Or all of the above

Definitely check out Minetest C55. Minetest C55 is essentially a watered down free Minecraft alternative. It’s another sandbox game like Minecraft, but is coded in C++ via the Irrlicht Engine. It has been in development since October 2010 by Perttu “celeron55” Ahola (guess where the C55 came from). The game is inspired by Infiniminer and the gameplay is practically the same as Minecraft. In a 3D environment, you simply obtain blocks in singleplayer or multiplayer and use it to build or destroy things. Luckily, this is an open source game that was released under the LGPL. This way, Windows and Linux users can easily debug the game and provide reports to the developer. Moreover, Minetest is super lightweight, and can be run on outdated hardware such as the Intel 945GM graphics card and portable devices.

Features

The map is huge, with 31,000 blocks in each direction, so you’ll have a blast. The main objective, like Minecraft, is to survive. Similarly, you can dig, build, destroy, and craft things. Unfortunately, there aren’t many types of blocks or mobs at the moment. This is a lot like Minecraft in its earlier beta stages of development. It is a really simple game, and there aren’t many texture packs. This is a great free Minecraft alternative. Although it currently lacks many features that are in Minecraft, Minetest has the crucial things like crafting. The Irrlicht Engine allows easy modifications and debugging for future developments. One important feature to point out is that there are no mobs come out at night, except for dungeon masters by dungeons. Typically, there is no threat, but you will find dungeon masters eventually when you dig down into dungeons. These guys have a lot of health and are quite hard to kill without the right sword. There is also a creative mode, where you can fly, get infinite blocks, pickaxes, and etc.

Pros:

Designed to run on really old hardware, even with its gigantic map size